Advanced Search

Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018, and a forthcoming book on American Psycho will be published by Columbia University Press. (May 2018)

NYR DAILY

‘Black Panther’: Choose Your Weapons

Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa and Michael B. Jordan as Erik Killmonger, with members of the Dora Milaje special forces behind them, from Ryan Coogler's Black Panther, 2018

Movies often flatten real African cultures into two-dimensional imagery—stereotypes in stereo, a quilt of clichés. But Wakanda, as everyone keeps reminding us, doesn’t exist. This gave Ryan Coogler free rein to create a country in the subjunctive mode: what if…? Given a blank canvas, he chose to sculpt and embroider various materials, genres, and tones. Black Panther is Shakespeare meets Shaka Zulu, Too $hort in Timbuktu.

Blade Runner’s Immaterial Girls

Ana de Armas as Joi and Ryan Gosling as K in Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, 2017

This belatedness of the sequel’s future changes the genre of Denis Villeneuve’s new film, Blade Runner 2049. This is not a work of prophetic science fiction. It is an alternative history—tracing out the implications of another timeline. This is perhaps why the layered repetitions in Villeneuve’s film do not build toward a new world, or multiply possibilities forward, but rather double them back, trapping them in an infinite regression of stereotype and allusion.

The Great Africanstein Novel

Amuria, Uganda, 2008

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s magisterial first novel Kintu continually diverts us from our preconceptions about Africa. Despite the generalizing and pigeonholing, African writers are rarely thought to speak to universal questions. But as its two-faced title—man/thing—suggests, Kintu does in fact have a grand philosophical question in mind. The novel forces us to reckon over and again with what it means to be kintu, to be man, or human.

Glossing Africa

Côte d'Ivoire, 1972

When African writers talk about glossaries, we don’t just exchange tips—How long? How comprehensive? By whom? We talk about whether to include one at all, whether to offer glosses within the text or omit all glossing entirely. To gloss, or not to gloss? That is the question.

Kenya in Another Tongue

Kenya, 1984

On December 30, 1977, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was arrested. If the coarse toilet paper at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi was meant to be punishing, “what was bad for the body was good for the pen.” Ngũgĩ wrote the notes that became Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary on that toilet paper. He also wrote the classic novel Devil on the Cross, which has been published in a new edition by Penguin.